Where the money went, 2006

[fivemack]

(SLC is the Student Loans Corporation; I have not suddenly become an inadequately-tithe-paying Mormon)


If you compare with 2004



I'm surprised how consistent my habits have been; housing's more expensive (a whole house in Cambridge costs more to rent than half a house in Cheltenham), I've stopped learning to drive, and, worryingly, I seem to have become about 25% meaner when I look at the 'charity' and 'gift.out' segments; this latter I need to do something about.

I should probably apologise in advance to American readers for the invisible sliver that is medical costs, and to the taxpayers of the future for the absence of 'savings' segments, though income tax and pension contributions come straight out of salary and don't show up in the data I use for these graphs.

Comments

Re: TMI

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I do feel that this is the top of the market, but I've felt that for the last four years, over which time house prices have approximately doubled.

I'll build a more fearsome data-miner and set it loose on www.mypropertyspy.co.uk this evening, they seem to have a dataset of the price paid for every house sold in England since 2000. It's presented for the gratification of estate agents rather than demographers, but fixing that is a Small Matter Of Perl. What I'm seeing in the small chunk (Histon Road and the end of Victoria Road, a region essentially consisting of houses bought by speculators for letting to students so maybe not relevant for my situation) that I've manually copy-and-pasted into gnumeric is:

• No house sold for about nine months after September 2001
  
• When they started selling again after that, prices abruptly roughly doubled from what they had been, possibly not coincidentally with interest rates having dropped from 6% to 4% between Feb 2000 and November 2001.
  
• Nobody sold between December 2005 and June 2006, whilst people had sold in that area every previous spring.
  
• 46 Histon Road sold in April 2000 for 107k, in July 2001 for 145k, and in July 2005 for 190k.
  
• The person who bought 52 Histon Road for 160k in September 2001 and sold it for 89k in March 2005 may deserve sympathy, though I haven't checked whether 52 Histon Road looks as if it burned down in February 2005. Or there might be a '1' missing from the database.